(ConservativeFreePress.com) – The civil trial of columnist E. Jean Carroll against former President Donald Trump only just started, but Trump is already testing out what the boundaries are over the presiding judge’s instruction.
On the first day of the civil defamation and battery trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan warned former President Trump’s lawyers that he “may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability” in regard to a new social media post. Earlier that day, Trump had taken to Truth Social to accuse Carroll’s lawyer of being a “political operative” and calling the accusations by Carroll a “SCAM.” Carroll has alleged that in the mid-1990s Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan. Trump has repeatedly denied these accusations.
Carroll is also suing Trump for defamation over certain comments that the former President had made after Carroll first came forth with her allegations in 2019.
On Wednesday, Kaplan commented about Trump’s post that it was “entirely inappropriate” and further argued that Trump was attempting to influence the jury, which is a move that fundamentally goes against the judge’s earlier instruction that both parties needed to “refrain from making any statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest.”
Kaplan informed Joe Tacopina, Trump’s attorney, that “your client is basically endeavoring certainly to speak to his ‘public,’ but more troublesome, to the jury in this case.” Tacopina has claimed that he had no knowledge of the post at the time that it was brought to the court’s attention. In his Truth Social post, Trump also argued that what Carroll was wearing during the alleged encounter should also be included in the case.
In a letter on February 10, Tacopina had noted that Trump would be winning to provide a DNA sample that could be compared to the genetic material found on the dress.
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